Thought this might be of some interest to the members of this list:
Twenty-Six Moves Suffice for Rubik's Cube
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/gene/papers/rubik.pdf
Kunkle and Cooperman presented their result July 29 at the
International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation in
Waterloo, Ontario.
* * *
Do you guys think that these kinds of machine-assisted verifications,
proofs, or "God's algorithms"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God's_algorithm) have any sort of
significance to research in FOM?
Joao Marcos